Experiment 4: Redefine productivity.
Most evenings when my husband says, Tell me about your day, I list all the concrete tasks I’ve completed: the laundry mountains leveled, the groceries bagged, the bowls and cups and forks bright in the strainer. A productive day is a day in which I pencil a line through many items in my to-do list. But lately, I’ve been asking myself: What would it look like to redefine productivity? What would it look like to evaluate my days from a Jesus-paced lens?
One of my favorite stories in Scripture is Jesus’ visit to two sisters, Mary and Martha. A woman of faith, Martha welcomes Jesus into her home and serves dutifully. If she hosts like I do, I imagine her whirring about the kitchen like a dragonfly: severing onions, scouring shelves for a missing spoon, almost burning her palm as she checks if the roast is done, panicking that it’s not. If she is like me, she rushes past her guests, barely taking the time to greet them. If she is like me, she probably defines productivity by the tasks she has done.
But Mary sits at Jesus’ feet. And listens.
Perhaps while filling up someone’s clay cup and balancing a basket of bread on her hip, a fringe of sweat banding her forehead, Martha cannot take it anymore. Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? she says, trying to keep calm in front of her guests. Tell her then to help me. Martha’s heart gallops with frustration, anger, the stress of cooking and juggling stacks of platters and wiping up spilled wine—alone.
Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things, Jesus tells her.
Yes, aren’t we all? The emails unread, the doctor appointments unmade, the dinner plans unthought of, the scummy sink unscoured, the balls, sandals, cherry tomatoes sowed all over the floor in grandiose chaos.
Yes, Lord, I am anxious about many things.
Photo Credit: Scott Umstattd on Unsplash
But one thing is necessary, Jesus tells Martha. Tells me.
One.
Mary has chosen the good portion, Jesus adds, which will not be taken away from her.
For most of my life, I have lived as if the good portion was what I could accomplish: the dollars earned, the awards won. I have lived as if the good portion was being useful, being productive in the secular American sense of work done. But I am challenged now, as a wife and mother, to start seeking the good portion.
The Good Portion
To show what the good portion, what divine productivity, means, Jesus points to Mary. Mary does not stand, half-listening, ready to leap up at any moment to another, more pressing task. She sits. Her posture is one of abandonment to the One before her. The gravity of her body rests at the feet of Jesus as if she had all day. As if the Person she sat before was worthy of her utmost attention. As if her whole world, the whole universe even, hinged on His words. Mary pours out her time scandalously, like she would later pour out lavish perfume.
Mary knows full well what the culture expects of her, what her sister Martha expects, what even her own inner taskmaster expects. But she ignores all these expectations. She focuses on one thing. The only necessary thing.
Embodying a listening posture, Mary is attentive to the present. God is speaking, so she drops everything. Henri Nouwen calls this moment-by-moment attention to God prayer: “Prayer is the center of the Christian life. It is the only necessary thing. It is living with God in the here and now.”
It seems that productivity is not about what I do, but how attentive I am to God. How faithful I am to heed His voice. How attuned my eyes are to the God beyond and behind the ordinary backdrop of each day.
Mary is also attentive to relationship. Body rooted to the ground, she sits physically near the Person before her, fully absorbed in His presence. Her example bids me to reflect: How well am I listening? Am I fully attentive to the souls God has given me to tend and love? Am I strengthening my relationships through loving attention, or weakening them in my obsession with the circus ring of cookingcleaningplanning whirling in my mind?
Photo Credit: Nacho Domingu
Mary is a branch abiding in the vine. She drinks in nourishment, fruit burgeons in her soul. She is strengthened and growing, blossoming in all she is meant to be, not by her own efforts, but simply by being with the Source. She knows that apart from Jesus, she can do nothing.
Instead of defining a productive day by how much I finished, what if I started to define it by how near I stayed to Jesus? Did I ask Him for help when my toddler refused (again, again) to let me brush his tiny teeth? Did I listen for what He called me to say when a neighbor shared a challenging situation? Did I thank Him for the glory of sweet cherries, skies freshly washed in rain, so many tomatoes bulging on the plant its cage falls over?
The Long and Slow Abiding
Redefining productivity takes faith. It takes trust to believe that what I cannot see (the rooting in Jesus, the long and slow abiding) is more important than what I can (the ink slashing through tangible tasks on my to-do list). Much of our walk with Jesus will be unseen, rooting under the earth in dark profundities we will never plumb. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls God the Father who is in secret. Believers walk with a God who sees hidden prayer, hidden generosity, hidden sacrifice. Hidden growth.
Seeking Jesus-paced fruitfulness is profoundly countercultural. It is not aimed at gaining applause or acknowledgement. It is highly inefficient.
But isn’t this just like the mustard seed: falling small into the earth unseen, then piercing the soil, rising towards the sun, soaking in given rains, and after a long, long while, offering shade under broad branches, scarlet berries, yellow blossoms, crooks for nests and the young birthed within them?
References: Luke 10:38-42; John 11:21-22, 27; John 12:1-8; John 15:5; Matthew 6:1-18; Henri Nouwen, The Only Necessary Thing
This blog is part of the “Experiments in Inefficiency” series, which explores what it means to resist unbiblical cultural and personal pressures to produce in favor of Jesus’ easy yoke.
